The long echoes of impunity: Bron Sibree interviews Philippe Sands

38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia ★★★★★
Philippe Sands
Orion 

Esteemed international law expert, barrister and author Philippe Sands doesn’t shrink from revealing that his latest non-fiction work, 38 Londres Street, contains a lot of detail “that is very upsetting”. The third in an extraordinarily compelling trilogy about international law and the dark, lingering legacy of historical injustices — which, like its best-selling predecessors, also draws on personal history — 38 Londres Street took Sands a decade to write, given that he had to track down and then meticulously investigate the complex mass of historical detail that informs it. And as he reveals in a note to the reader, “This is my most ambitious writing project yet, and maybe the one that is closest to my heart.”

It seems to have resonated deeply with his readers too, for, like the previous books in the trilogy, the Baillie Gifford Prize-winning East West Street and The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive, 38 Londres Street raced up the best-seller lists when it was published several weeks ago and has not fallen out of them. The notion of impunity lies at the heart of this engrossing narrative, which reads like a thriller and haunts the mind long after one has finished it. Essentially a twin narrative of, or double investigation into, the lives of two unrepentant mass murderers — Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and Nazi Walter Rauff, the latter of whom escaped to Latin America in 1949 — 38 Londres Street was partly seeded by Sands’ 2020 book The Ratline. It told the story of Nazi Otto Wächter, in whose family archives Sands found a letter from Rauff — who was in Syria at that time — to Otto advising his old SS comrade to escape to South America. “I then Googled him,” explains Sands, “and found that he’d ended up in Chile.”

Sands learnt too that Rauff invented mobile gas vans and was responsible for killing hundreds and thousands of Jews in them during World War 2. But Rauff, who had been indicted for war crimes, also ended up in Chile, and that fact instantly piqued his interest. He says, “By then, I’d already decided I would do the next book on Pinochet. And I just started digging and digging and digging. There was in my brain this question: ‘Could there be a connection with Pinochet?’ It was a hunch, a litigator’s hunch, and that’s how I started.” 

The book takes its title from the address of the historic building in central Santiago that the Pinochet regime’s secret police, the Dirección de Intelligencia Nacional, or DINA, used to secretly torture and “disappear” people — one of many places DINA used for this purpose. It opens with Sands’ account of the moment on October 17 1998 — his 38th birthday — that he first heard of the arrest of Pinochet in London, at the request of a Spanish judge, with a view to extradite the Chilean dictator to Spain to be tried for genocide and crimes against humanity. Sands famously went on to advise Human Rights Watch in the case against Pinochet, which ultimately failed and saw the dictator returned to his homeland. But as Sands divulges in the book’s prologue, “I’d originally been contacted by Pinochet’s lawyers, and my wife said she’d divorce me if I did it.”

One of the many intriguing threads in this intricate double narrative is how the Spanish case against Pinochet began, as well as the legalities, personalities, processes and politics in terms of which the case came into being and continued to play out for two years before the efforts to extradite the dictator failed. Sands credits his detailed knowledge of the background to the case to Spanish prosecutor Carlos Castresana, who reached out to Sands in response to an interview he gave to El País newspaper about The Ratline, in which he revealed his intention to write about Pinochet.

“He explained to me that the matter had really begun with a single case of a Spanish Chilean victim, Carmelo Soria. I’d never heard of this man,” says Sands, who in following his “litigator’s hunch” was not only searching for evidence of the long-rumoured connection between Pinochet and Rauff, who’d also evaded attempts at extradition and died in 1984 without ever facing justice, but also “looking to discover what the real circumstances of Pinochet’s return to Chile were”.

It was only later, when mentioning the conversation to his Spanish-born mother-in-law, that Sands discovered — echoing the accidental way he learnt of how his own relatives were murdered by the Nazis while researching East West Street — that Soria was, in fact, a relative of his wife. His mother-in-law immediately introduced him to other members of the family in Chile, and he says, “I’ve come to know them very well. Carmelo Soria was the head of the UN office in Santiago. He was a dual national, having been born in Spain and later having acquired Chilean nationality.”

But neither Soria’s position nor his Spanish nationality prevented him from being snatched off Santiago’s streets in July 1976, tortured and then murdered by DINA agents. Sands has not shrunk from providing the details of DINA’s murderous handiwork (and its horrific, enduring legacy) or the activities of Rauff, who he was able to confirm, after getting to know a former survivor of torture at 38 Londres Street and two former DINA agents, had indeed worked with Pinochet and assisted DINA. As undeniably riveting as this book is, there is much in its pages that will horrify readers — not least Henry Kissinger’s support of the Pinochet regime despite knowing about the human rights abuses. Margaret Thatcher too, he reminds us, was a huge Pinochet admirer. Yet Sands refrains from passing any authorial judgment. He prefers to “just lay out the material I’ve come across and explain how I’ve come across it”. He would rather “leave it to the reader to work out what its authority, value and weight are”.

Another of the book’s sensational revelations is how Sands managed to obtain confirmation of the existence of a deal between the British and Chilean governments to bring Pinochet back to Chile. For this reason alone, 38 Londres Street has generated intense interest in Britain, Chile and Spain. In addition, Sands’ mention in its pages of a 10-page dossier by members of the Chilean government advising Pinochet how to feign dementia to foil the extradition attempt has “caused a big issue”.

But it’s not just his revelations surrounding Spain’s failed 1998 extradition case that has “catalysed a lot of conversation in Chile”, maintains Sands, but the “huge significance” of the matter itself. “It was the first time in history that a former head of state of one country was arrested in another country on allegations of having committed international crimes. For that reason, I think of it as possibly the most significant moment in international criminal justice, in terms of cases, since the Nuremburg trials. It has totally opened the gate and had a lot of consequences.”

Not only did it open the door to hundreds of cases being brought against some — but by no means all — of those who had perpetrated crimes authorised by Pinochet, but soon after the dictator’s return to Chile in 2000, the country’s Court of Appeal ruled in the notorious “Caravan of Death” case that he had no immunity. He was finally stripped of all immunities, but he died in 2006 without ever paying for a single one of his many crimes. These same issues of immunity and impunity, says Sands, are extremely relevant right now. “This book has touched a nerve in relation to warrants for Mr Putin, the leaders of Hamas, and Mr Netanyahu. It also raises questions about whether they are entitled to claim immunity.” And as for how these cases will play out? “I think it’s just too soon to tell,” says Sands. “They are at the interplay of law and politics, and there are many factors that will become relevant. But one of the things the Pinochet story tells us is that you just never know what turn history will take.”

PHILIPPE SANDS ON BOOKS THAT HAVE INFLUENCED HIM

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

This is one of Zweig’s last books, and it evokes the lost world of the early days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It then moves forward into the 1930s and details the emergence of a global conflict and the disappearance of all elements of security on a day-to-day basis. When your world fundamentally changes in an instant, how do you cope with that? I think it’s a particularly timely book for some of the issues we face right now.

By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño

Published in English in 2000, this book is a fictionalised account of the relationship between Augusto Pinochet and Walter Rauff. I love the idea of a novelist, a fine novelist, stepping into a legal void and, through the power of imagination, opening the door to some of the things I found in my own research. This is a novel, but it takes elements of fact to weave a story that is a precursor to my own book of non-fiction. I first read it in the early 2000s, and then I forgot about it. It was only when I was in Santiago that I went back and read it again. I was stunned that he drew a connection between Rauff and Pinochet that I have now found to be a real one.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

This is a story about longing to return to a place of the past. It’s about a woman in Holland who has been dispossessed of her home and its property who takes remarkable steps to reintegrate herself into that place and its objects. It was incredibly beautifully written and drew me in with its simple clarity and captivating depiction of characters. I absolutely loved them.

Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas

This is one of my favourite books. It’s a Spanish Civil War novel based on a true story that turns on a moment of eye contact between a nationalist prisoner and a republican soldier who is about to execute him. What follows is a speculative exploration of what may have happened. What I loved about this book was the quality of the writing and the connection between fact and fiction. The author took a true story and fictionalised it to open up different ways of thinking.

A Perfect Spy by John le Carré

Le Carré was my neighbour and my friend, and it is the book by him which gave me the most insights into him and a sense of what made him tick — in particular, his remarkable relationship with his father, who was a con man. It is also the most autobiographical of his works, and its attention to detail, including family detail, has influenced the journey I have been on over the last 15 years in coming to understand how you take complex material and unpack it to make it readable.